Tobackoff ! # 0 : One Bad Habit

HOW DID I START ?

Irrelevant,right ? I thought so, too. But it was pointed out to me by smokers, ex-smokers and parents of smokers that the reasons are important. Because, you see, it isn't always the result of peer pressure.

Take my case. I was an anti-smoker - a pretty rabid one, too - and that was a tough act to maintain, considering that both my folks were smokers for a while ! Graduated from Mumbai (purportedly a den of iniquity) after living in a hostel through my three years of college. Landed in Cal in the summer of '84, still a non-smoker, largely a non-drinker.

Got largely undone by the miasma of Bong parochialism that was all around me. I was lambasted for not knowing Bengali, for solving cryptic crosswords, for reading Hugh Prather. Also for walking my dog in shorts (me, not the dog !). And then I joined the hail-fellow-well-met firm of Lovelock & Lewes to do my articleship, and was sent to ITC to do their audit.

Three months and ninety complimentary packets of "made for each other" Wills Filter Kings later, I suddenly thought that it might be an idea to act as my father's "food"-taster,as it was.

So I smoked the ninety-first packet. It was Rebel Without A Cause, all over again. Coughed, hacked and cried my way through ten sticks of tobacco, telling myself that, when in Turkey, you prolly need to do like the turkeys do !!

Except that. I'd grown up on a diet of Oscar Wilde. And the man had mantras. The relevant one here was "nothing succeeds like excess".

I took less than six months for me to scale up to 60 sticks a day. Thanks to ITC, it didn't cost me anything. But I paid the price in terms of Pulmonary EMIs, over the next quarter of a century.